The recap
On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, at a sprawling country house in Surrey, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis is staging a play to welcome her glamorous older brother home. She is clever, imaginative and certain she understands the adult world. Her sister Cecilia, just down from Cambridge, is restless and irritable, especially around Robbie Turner, the cleaning woman's son whose education her father has paid for. A broken vase, a misdelivered letter and a scene glimpsed from an upstairs window set off a chain of misunderstandings, and by nightfall a child's misreading has altered three lives. The novel then follows its characters into the chaos of the Second World War, from the retreat to Dunkirk to the overwhelmed hospital wards of London. McEwan builds a love story under enormous pressure, and a searching meditation on guilt, imagination and whether a wrong can ever truly be put right.
Why read it
For readers who want a sweeping wartime romance that also rewards close attention; it is a book that lingers and invites a second read.
Fun facts
- 01
McEwan's father was a motorbike dispatch rider wounded in the legs during the 1940 retreat to Dunkirk; his memories fed the novel's war chapters, and McEwan gave him a brief walk-on part.
- 02
It was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize, losing narrowly to Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, and went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
- 03
For the wartime nursing scenes McEwan drew on a memoir by nurse Lucilla Andrews, credited in his author's note; the debt later sparked a public plagiarism debate that McEwan answered in print.
- 04
Joe Wright's 2007 film adaptation received seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actress for Saoirse Ronan, and won for Dario Marianelli's score.
